Heather Heyer’s mother testifies at sentencing hearing for James Fields Jr., says she will not allow daughter's voice to be silenced

Heather Heyer’s mother said Monday that she will never allow her daughter’s voice to be silenced.

Susan Bro testified at the sentencing hearing of white nationalist James Fields Jr., who was convicted of first-degree murder in the death of Heyer on Friday.

Advertisement

A jury had found that Fields intentionally drove his Dodge Challenger into a group of counterprotesters at the "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville and fatally struck Heyer.

Fields, 21, was also found guilty of injuring dozens of others who were marching peacefully after last year’s rally. He was convicted of five counts of aggravated malicious wounding, three counts of malicious wounding and one count of failing to stop at an accident involving a death.

"I do not hate Mr. Fields," Bro said during Monday’s sentencing hearing in Charlottesville, according to NBC 29. "I'm leaving him in the hands of justice.”

Victim Al Bowie testified she has been hospitalized three times for PTSD since the attack.

"Please know that the world is not a safe place with Fields in it," she told the jury.

Dr. Daniel Murrie, a forensic psychologist who performed a court-appointed mental health evaluation of Fields, testified Monday that the convicted killer was hospitalized in a psychiatric facility when he was 7 and again at age 10, according to NBC 29. Fields also saw an autism specialist after showing symptoms for Asperger's, according to Murrie.

Fields was diagnosed with schizoid personality disorder and he was bullied often, according to the doctor.

The "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville was organized to protest the planned removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. The rally featured hundreds of Ku Klux Klan members, neo-Nazis and other white nationalists.

Fields had been known to worship Hitler. Jurors heard phone calls from his mother to the jail in which he refered to Heyer's mother as a "communist" and "one of those anti-white supremacists."